Lady Lilith

 “My first husband was Count von Manteuffel, a great favorite of the late Czar, and one of the ablest men of the old Russia. He had been a lady-killer in his day was accounted a confirmed bachelor when he came into my ken. 

Before that, however I had gotten myself well talked about by running away with Prince Nicholas Yousoupoff, brother of the man who killed the monk, Rasputin. 

Manteuffel knew of that episode, and agreed to forgive it if I would put Yousoupoff out my mind and out of my heart. I agreed to do it, but it is not so easy to forget a former lover. Particularly when he is still alive and still ardent in pursuit of you.

On the night before my marriage to von Manteuffel I went with the Prince to a midnight restaurant in St. Petersburg. I had to steal out my mother’s mansion with hardly any clothes on. But Nicholas had a gorgeous wrap in his car. It was property of the lady with whom he had dined an hour before. He carried me off and we drank champagne until my senses reeled. Still, on the next day, in church, I prayed God to make me a good wife to Arvid von Manteuffel! 

Nicholas loved me madly, and I had given him my first love. I was not eighteen. The Prince followed my husband and me to Paris. He wrote me, lay in wait for me. He cursed himself for not having married me. I swore to him that Arvid would be a husband in name only, and Nicholas implored me to tell him if my husband ever tried to assert his martial rights. He said he would kill him if he did. 

I consulted the great clairvoyant, Fraya, who me a great danger was hanging over me, and that the man I loved would die a violent death. I tried to laugh away my fears, and went nightly to the opera or the theater. But it was only too true. When we returned to Russia, Nicholas followed us, and my husband promptly sent him a challenge. They fought, and Nicholas fell at first fire.

The shock drove me to the verge of madness. My affair with Nicholas, of course, had been known in St. Petersburg and I was ostracized from then on…”